The strategy of rapid dominance, more simply known as "shock and awe", seeks through overwhelming superiority and spectacular displays of force to to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight. Confusion, information overload, a perception of invulnerability and horrible casualties dealt to the target combined to make even highly trained soldiers psychologically and often physiologically incapable of fighting. It often worked regardless of bravery, loyalty, or the target's skill, for similar reasons to why traumatic stress could not just be pushed through with the same qualities. For somewhat adjacent reasons, ten percent casualties over a short time would often cripple the average military unit's combat ability.
The Red Dragon's soldiers did not react to losing both their field leader and a fifth of their numbers anywhere near to what such doctrines predicted. Instead of reeling, they charged with abandon. Instead of being confused, they acted as one. Instead of being emotional, impacted by fear, rage, confusion or shock, they acted almost mechanically and in total silence by launching four hundred energy blasts in the direction of those responsible for their losses. It was bloodlust, a murderous urge but a cold and calculated one... and they all reacted in exactly the same way.
I shielded my face with my arms as crimson energy blasts struck me en masse, each one no more than a slap or a rough prod to my much greater comparative durability. Then they did it again and again, several blasts from each enemy all delivered in the span of a second. Their formation broken, they were acting individually now but their attacks were still dangerous. The crimson magical energy was not just a physical hit; it was corrosive and little by little my normally white and blue power-wrought costume started to blacken and sizzle. Without a suit just as durable as myself, it would have felt like being pelted by lit cigars would have to a normal person. As things stood, with the costume as an ablative layer their combined efforts only barely hurt but they were also odd. I'd seen how much power The Wizard could get out of them and they gave off more since his death. Maybe he'd just sucked at it? Too late to ask him now, he was too busy littering the place to answer.
Since they didn't seem like they'd stop any time soon, I moved. Just with flight and my significant agility I was faster than most supers. With Forced Acceleration speeding everything up they seemed to be crawling through air as thick as mud and even their attacks had slowed down enough to be no faster than bullets. Before they could react I was in the midst of the closest group, shattering clavicles, punching at armpits to dislocate arms, kicking in knees. Without my friends being at risk of dying, I could afford to disable instead of kill - or at least so I thought at first.
Flight makes immobilising people by simple limb damage an exercise in frustration. Enemies not needing their limbs for locomotion would only stop due to pain and shock, both things to which supers were more resistant. The addition of energy attacks complicated things even more, because the obvious fanatics did not need to be physically well to use them effectively. Only unconsciousness or complete incapacitation worked, and even then only for a time.
That left disengagement or surrender up to the enemy, and they seemed to be too blood-lusted to understand either. Abandoning ranged attacks against me completely, they mobbed me in melee. I was faster, even a lot faster, but with several hundred flyers approaching from all around under the relative confines of the magical dome they managed to grab me eventually, then started to stab with dagger-constructs at everything they could reach. I soon disappeared under a swarm of crazed berserkers and while a tough costume is great against slow corrosion, it is less effective against stabs and lunges. Their efforts amounted to little more than paper cuts, but a dozen paper cuts were annoying. A hundred might leave someone hurt. A thousand were starting to become serious.
I went incorporeal for a moment and all my injuries flared into agony as the void seemed to suck out my blood at alarming rates. I dropped back into the physical world with a yell, finding myself still within stabbing range. Note to self for future reference; going into a super-vacuum while having a bazillion leaks was not a good idea.
A blast of force pushed the dozens of enemies mobbing me for a moment, affording me a glimpse of the rest of the fight. Jerry was shooting arcs of lightning out of his everything, as if his armor was some giant, man-shaped taser. He looked scuffed up, scrapes and scorch marks pitting his armor plates, but mostly OK. Mandy was playing tag with the hundred or so bad guys that had gone after her, blasting them as they closed, teleporting away the moment they got within reach. Both my friends were slowly whittling down the opposition, already over a dozen incapacitated, crippled, or maybe even dead fanatics littering the shortened mountain beneath us all.
A force-field got me some breathing space by keeping the two hundred or so Red Dragon soldiers still focused on me beyond stabbing distance, forcing them to start with the corrosive blasts again. This gave my Empowering Regeneration time to not only start healing the countless tiny cuts I'd taken but also slightly boost my physical ability. It was far less effective than it would have been against a single powerful opponent but that small power-up would keep trickling in throughout the fight. Like in martial arts or combat sport movies, the intrepid heroine would initially be on the back foot but she'd keep adapting to the villain's tricks or just get plain better until the bad guys exhausted themselves.
Except something behind all the near-mindless aggression and robotic coordination of the soldiers noticed me doing just that and decided that it would not do. A hundred and eighty crimson bolts slammed into my force-field and I felt the pressure against my mind. It tasted like fear and savagery and scrambled thoughts, and the force-field flickered. I was reminded of how the prisoner's bindings had just vanished earlier and laid down a second barrier behind the first. It was good that I did because the second mass attack dispelled the force-field entirely.
That was not fair. Weren't these guys cultivator expies from some xianxia novel where all enemies were pathetic screw-ups whose strength evaporated the moment the main character came up against them? Why did the enemy seem to get a vote the moment these powers stopped existing in mere stories and intruded into real life? I didn't want to have to hurt these guys either, no more than absolutely necessary to get them to stop trying to kill my friends and/or act like mindless pawns to a terrorist cult leader.
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My eyes flashed with piercing force and destructive energy, twin blue-white beams lancing out through the third force-field I raised unimpeded. They lanced through the bodies of brainwashed cultists launching themselves at me with no regard for their own life and limb. Beams that could core out naval warships met enhanced human flesh and the beams won. Stomachs, kidneys, lower spines, groins; the beams dealt gaping, searing wounds in the most painful but not immediately lethal manner possible, leaving enemies twitching helplessly in agony and incapable of further action. People with superhuman durability and vitality would not die to such horrific injuries as unpowered humans would have and given time they could make full recoveries from anything that didn't kill and didn't prevent further healing.
Little by little the enemy was whittled down, two hundred foes being reduced to half that number, then to only fifty, then to a bit over a dozen. It was a painful, tiring slog to fight that many enemies while also playing defense and doing my best not to kill them out of hand but after the halfway point they could no longer bring down my defenses and deal more injuries. The battle seemed to speed up even as it wound down.
Jerry and Mandy were winning their own half of the battle. The futuristically armored artificer had reconfigured his armored plating into some sort of semi-liquid metal that functioned as both a fluid and a solid. Dents formed on this new protective layer with every blow but almost immediately smoothed out. The only damage that did not vanish was the small amounts of material ablated away by the corrosive properties of the enemy's red magic, material Jerry had little trouble replacing via a huge internal reservoir that to my senses was larger in volume than the armor and him combined.
Offensively he had modified his mini-missiles again into what felt and sounded like hugely overpowered flash-bangs. Individual explosions were no stronger than a ton of TNT each, enough to stagger and even injure relatively low-powered supers like his targets, but the actual take downs came from how they generated flashes powerful enough to blind through both closed eyelids and protective magic, while also generating shock-waves that disrupted the central nervous system.
The red-haired sorceress used the same tricks of magical manipulation as before, absorbing enemy magical blasts and either converting them to more spells of her own or reflecting them back to the source. Without several hundred of them fighting her at once, the Red Dragon's soldiers did not seem able to overwhelm her defense and mobility. Those of them that chose to engage her in melee fared even more poorly as Mandy drained their reserves out of their bodies and returned them as lightning that intensified the closer they got to her. Those cultists that had not been taken out in the initial volleys or the lightning discharges stood back and used their enhanced strength to hurl boulders almost as fast as bullets. Their indirect tactics landed a few blows and by the time the last superpowered martial artist fell unconscious she was wrung out, dirty, dusty, and very annoyed but otherwise intact.
"That was exhausting," Jerry exclaimed when we were finally done. "These kind of ambushes are why I don't like taking the field without a quarter megaton of fusion-powered, antimatter-armed robot wrapped around me. Magical invisibility that beats two dozen different sensor systems and mountain-busting attacks the bad guys can pull off without breaking it are both bullshit."
"Nah, it's perfectly OK as long as we are the ones doing it," I reminded him. The Valkyries had taken advantage of Anne's even more extensive cloaking skills for months now.
"You don't get to talk, Miss I-am-always-regenerating," the formerly hopeless nerd and currently greatest tech guy on the planet said as he waved an armored finger in my direction. "Five minutes from now you'll probably be A-okay while the rest of us will still need to deal with what happened."
"You're telling me you don't have a similar skill?" I challenged, making my eyes glow. It wasn't needed for any of my powers to work but I'd found visual cues very helpful in reminding people of which comic book character I more closely resembled. "I'm scanning your body right now and it's recovering abnormally quickly for a non-physical super."
"Yeah, but I actually had to build my version out of scraps," he shot back with a smile. "Hooked my ass into a Thorium reactor and started converting its output to mana and everything. You? You get to do better all the time and without any invasive probes."
"That's because I'm awesome, baby," I countered and jiggled my probe-free backside. "Mads, tell him I'm awesome."
"You're both idiots," the sorceress growled at us. It was always funny when she got angry, especially since she was perhaps she shortest adult super I'd ever seen. "Now shut up, I'm trying to see why the exclusion dome is still active."
"It is?" I looked up and yeah, giant red dome. That was the downside of super-senses; live with them too long and things that could hide from them could blindside you even when they should have been obvious to your more mundane perception. The dome still being up was an oddity, because who was maintaining it? It had been put up by a big formation of a hundred supers working together, could it have been well-made enough to need no maintenance? Just in case I looked around for more oddities... and found them. "Guys? Does it look like to you that half these cultists have grown larger?"
On hearing this said cultists, who should have been too injured to mess around, got up like puppets on strings. With perfect coordination down to the millisecond, they all conjured the same daggers of crimson magic that had been giving me papercuts earlier and stabbed them through the hearts of the still-unconscious cultists. A hundred and forty deaths swept through the mountaintop like a freezing gust, a disquieting whisper, the last breath of a dying man and suddenly the air felt heavier.
They were added to the ten that had died despite our best efforts to capture the Red Dragon's minions alive, to the hundred I'd killed earlier to break the trap meant to kill my two best friends. And as the weight of those murders added to the atmosphere of death and destruction, the awake cultists recovered from their wounds before our eyes even as they grew in size, their limbs becoming longer, their skulls thicker, their muscles bulging monstrously.
"Damn, sacrificial link," Mandy muttered and I rolled my eyes.
"Gee, you think? Half of them just died before our eyes," I reminded her, rolling my shoulders and preparing for a second fight.
"Not just those, all of them," she shot back, her staff glowing with a loud crackle of power... but not as loud as before. "The empowerment is not safe and it's been set up so each one who dies makes the rest stronger."
"Aw crap, that bullshit again!" Things like that had been pulled off by the invaders. They'd absolutely sucked for everyone back then and I didn't expect them to suck any less now.
The only good thing is that we no longer needed to decide what to do with the Red Dragon. If he was already using that kind of black magic on his own followers what he'd be willing to do to everyone else would be worse.
Why did villains always have to go for the worst thing they could do? This was why we couldn't have nice things...